YIJING DAO

The Way of I Ching

Stephen Karcher is a well-experienced I Ching diviner,
with associations with the Jungian Eranos Foundation, who has written a
number of I Ching books now, some a bit similar. 'The Way of I Ching',
in Thorson's 'Way of…' series, is in fact a reissue of his 1995 'The
Elements of I Ching', in the 'Elements of…' series from the now
defunct publisher Element Books.

'The Way of I Ching' is unusual among beginner I Ching books in that it
is actually quite good, and at least the author knows the subject. I might
quibble about a point of history in the introduction in which he suggests
the I Ching originated from the shamanic tradition, as opposed to having
its roots in the practices of Shang Dynasty kings and their diviners, but
in general the book is useful and insightful in practice.

Where this I Ching differs from many is in its emphasis on the actions
of 'the spirits'. While Karcher uses this device a little too often and
in a formulaic manner, he is essentially right that this was the early belief
about how the I Ching 'worked'. The ancient kings consulted it to discover
what 'The Ancestors', i.e. the dead kings before them, thought about their
plans. He also restores the concept of the 'angry ghost'. I was very pleased
to see this in hexagram 18, which is indeed about a curse laid by the ghost
of a dead ancestor who is causing mayhem because he or she is angry at being
ignored (i.e., not receiving sacrifices), but when the motif began to crop
up in other hexagrams I thought it inappropriate and liable to confuse.

Down the centuries the accent on ghosts and spirits was removed from the
I Ching, such that if you look at the most popular (and still the best)
English translation, that of Richard Wilhelm and Cary F Baynes, you will
find little about spirits, rather the tone is ethical and philosophical,
some would even say moral.

One thing needs correcting: Karcher suggests that the method of consulting
via coins is not as good as the yarrow rite because the yarrow's probabilities
of yin and yang lines occurring is asymmetric, whereas it is symmetric in
the coin ritual (yin and yang equally likely), and therefore not representative
of how it should be. This is a common fallacy, because in fact the yarrow
rite as we know it today is a late reconstruction and is not necessarily
performed as it was originally [see Steve Moore's review of Stick
Dice and note on Yijing probabilities]. The way
to perform the original rite has been lost. In fact, the oldest extant method
we have is the coin method. I use coins myself, without any sense that it
is an inferior method. Where the yarrow rite really scores is that it is
more meditative and encouraging of deeper contemplation, and it is not impetuously
resorted to, but whether yin and yang lines were originally intended to
have differing chances of arising is quite unknown. To my thinking, their
chances ought to be equal since they are polar opposites. In practice, of
course, whatever method you use you obtain the hexagram you need.

Steve Marshall

[Written for 'Light: Magazine of The College of Psychic
Studies'. November 2002.]

A note on Alfred Huang’s
I Ching books

I don't value Alfred Huang's books greatly. His history
in his translation of the Yi is unreliable and there are clumsy errors.
For instance, in hexagram 35 he is aware that it is the Marquis of Kang
who is receiving horses, yet in his commentary he writes that it is King
Wen receiving the horses. I particularly don't like the way he has taken
the traditional history and attempted to make it sound like it is referred
to throughout the Yi without offering any evidence but merely stating that
this is so. This is the poorest thing about his work, and he departs from
the degree to which traditional Yijing scholars have ever been willing to
link the conquest to the hexagrams. That he does this without evidence and
simply on his sayso is pretty poor. (The
Mandate of Heaven deals with the evidence to link the Yijing with its
traditional foundation in the conquest of the Shang, offering a completely
different picture of what actually happened.)

Huang's knowledge of Chinese history and myth is restricted to the usual
repeated stories regurgitated seemingly without any awareness of the advances
made in Yijing research in the past 70 years. What is worse, he doesn't
really appear to understand the material, he simply appends traditional
historical snippets to the hexagrams whether they apply or not, and sometimes
quite frankly makes up history, or, to be fairer perhaps, misremembers it
and in the process elaborates in a manner that cannot be justified by the
original sources (none of which are cited either, though recognisable to
those familiar with Chinese history).

His book on Yijing numerology similarly contains errors. In his analysis
of Shao Yong's square Huang misses the fact that the gua on the 111000–000111
diagonal (bottom left to top right) are composed of complementary trigrams.
Given that he's pointing out things to notice about the square there's a
lot he doesn't mention, calling into question how deep his understanding
of it actually is. [See the article on Yijing hexagram
sequences for further details on the Shao Yong square.] Some hexagrams
in his diagrams are also incorrect – given such complex material,
one would have thought the book would have been given a better proof-read
to eliminate such glaring errors that will cause confusion among those not
advanced enough to immediately spot them and mentally correct them. Many
of the things he deals with are better dealt with by Prof Ed Hacker, and
the diagrams in Diana ffarington-Hook's books and Chu and Sherrill are better.

It was a good idea to gather such material into one book, but he cites
no sources and the book is essentially rehash of already extant material
with much repetitive padding and little original to say, apart from the
secret method of constructing hexagrams on the fingers he says was taught
to him by a blind fortune teller he shared a prison cell with. What a pity
though that for something as potentially interesting as that he just skips
over it. (Jou Tsung Hwa mentioned the same method on pp 30–31
of his 1984 book 'The Tao of I Ching: Way to Divination'.)

People say they like his Yijing, but I wonder myself whether they have
bought into the idea that Huang is an authority and have simply believed
it on publisher's hyperbole, not knowing any better. Certainly it is a nice
looking Yijing, but the content isn't particularly great to the discerning
eye. Wilhelm-Baynes is still the best English translation, and, given that
this work dates from 1924 in the German, it is surprisingly accurate in
terms of being true to the actual traditional history, although of course
it came before the insights that have been made available through the Shang
oracle bones so supplementary texts that deal with this subject are useful
(mainly Rutt, Marshall,
Kunst [thesis], and Shaughnessy [thesis], to an extent Gotshalk, though
I have great reservations about his 'rearrangement' of hexagram line statements).
Despite some errors in the Zhouyi part of Wilhelm-Baynes, the book's great
strength is Wilhelm's beautifully expressed encapsulation of the commentaries
of the Song dynasty philosophers Cheng Yi and Zhu Xi, which do not depend
on the Shang discoveries. It is a true traditional Yijing, Huang's I'm afraid
is somewhat of a pretender to the throne and certainly not the 'definitive'
edition it claims to be. It is not even complete, for instance both the
Dazhuan and the Shuogua commentaries are omitted, despite the fact that
the book's title is 'The Complete I Ching'.

Joel Biroco

[Originally written in response to a request for my opinion
on Huang's books on a newsgroup.]